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Jerusalem. The Biography

Jerusalem. The Biography

Titel: Jerusalem. The Biography Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Simon Sebag Montefiore
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forcibly expelled the king and smashed his ragtag army, completing the collapse of Lawrence’s plans. The end of Greater Syria and the riots helped form a Palestinian national identity. *
    On 24 April 1920, at the San Remo Conference, Lloyd George accepted the Mandate to rule Palestine, based on the Balfour Declaration, and appointed Sir Herbert Samuel as the first high commissioner. He arrived at the station in Jerusalem on 30 June, resplendent in a white uniform, pith helmet with feathers, and a sword, to the boom of a seventeen-gun salute. Samuel may have been Jewish and a Zionist but he was no dreamer: Lloyd George found him ‘dry and cold’. A journalist thought he was ‘as free from passion as an oyster’ and one of his officials noted he was ‘stiffish – never seems able to forget his office’. When the military governor handed over control of Palestine, Samuel managed one of his few recorded jokes, signing a chit that read ‘Received from Major-General Sir Louis J Bols KCB, One Palestine, complete.’ He then added ‘E and O [Errors and Omissions] excepted’, but there would be many of both.
    Initially Samuel’s calm tact soothed Palestine after the shock of Nabi Musa. Setting up Government House in the Augusta Victoria on the Mount of Olives, he released Jabotinsky, pardoned Amin Husseini, temporarily limited Jewish immigration and reassured the Arabs. British interests were no longer the same as they had been in 1917. Curzon, now foreign secretary, was opposed to full-blown support for Zionism and watered down Balfour’s promises. There would be a Jewish home but no state then or later. Weizmann felt betrayed but the Arabs regarded even this as disastrous. By 1921, a total of 18,500 Jews had arrived in Palestine. During the next eight years, Samuel allowed in another 70,000. 16
    In the spring of 1921, Samuel’s boss Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, arrived in Jerusalem accompanied by his adviser Lawrence of Arabia.
    CHURCHILL CREATES THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST: LAWRENCE’S SHERIFIAN SOLUTION
     
    ‘I liked Winston so much,’ said Lawrence afterwards, ‘and have such respect for him.’ Churchill had already enjoyed a career of swashbuckling adventure, bumptious self-promotion and irrepressible success. Now in his late forties, the colonial secretary was confronted with the punishing cost in blood and treasure of garrisoning a new empire: Iraq was already in the grip of a bloody insurgency against British rule. Churchill therefore called a conference in Cairo to hand over a certain amount of power to Arab rulers under British influence. Lawrence proposed granting a new kingdom of Iraq to Faisal.
    On 12 March 1920, Churchill convened his Arab experts in the Semiramis Hotel while a pair of Somalian lion cubs played around their feet. Churchill enjoyed the luxury, having no wish to experience ‘thankless deserts’, but Lawrence hated it. ‘We lived in a marble bronze hotel,’ he wrote. ‘Very expensive, and luxurious – horrible place. Makes me Bolshevik. Everybody in the Middle East is here. Day after tomorrow, we go to Jerusalem. We’re a very happy family: agreed upon everything important’ – in other words, Churchill had accepted the ‘Sherifian solution’: Lawrence finally saw some honour restored in the wake of the broken British promises to the sherif and his sons.
    The old sherif, King Hussein of Hejaz, was no match for the Wahabi warriors led by the Saudi chieftain Ibn Saud. * When his son Abdullah tried to repel the Saudis with 1,350 fighters, they were routed: Abdullah had to flee through the back of his tent in his underwear, surviving ‘by a miracle’. They had planned that Faisal would rule Syria-Palestine and Abdullah would be king of Iraq. Now that Faisal was getting Iraq, this left nothing for Abdullah.
    While Churchill’s conference was proceeding in Cairo, Abdullah, ledthirty officers and 200 Bedouin into today’s Jordan – technically part of the British Mandate – to seize his own meagre fiefdom – even though Lord Curzon thought he was ‘much too big a cock for so small a dunghill’. The news of this escapade presented Churchill with a fait accompli. Lawrence advised Churchill to back Abdullah. Churchill despatched Lawrence to invite the prince to meet him in Jerusalem.
    At midnight on 23 March, Churchill and his wife Clementine set off for Jerusalem by train, and were greeted at Gaza by enthusiastic crowds crying ‘Cheers

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